High-priced study group, alienated into a "pig-killing plate"?

Two days before the 2023 college entrance examination, early in the morning, Beijing South Railway Station was already crowded with waves of student groups who went out of the province to study. In just one hour, hundreds of people from five primary and secondary schools stepped on the train to Shanghai, Huangshan and other places.

"It's the peak of research before the summer vacation, and many schools have been selected as examination rooms, can't hold classes, and just go out to study." Wang Huwen, CEO of Beijing MicroPort Bozhi Education Technology Co., Ltd., walked through the crowd at the station, coordinating the research groups of the two schools to enter the station. Coupled with the summer business, he has undertaken 28 study groups to Shanghai, and "at least 500 companies are doing research in Beijing alone."

Soon, research groups from other places coming to Beijing will also flood into Beijing. "Throughout the summer, except for suburbs such as Mentougou, hotels in downtown Beijing could hardly book batch rooms for the entire period, and the hotel reported that they were all covered by the study group." Yan Chu, a consultant to an educational institution that has been established for more than ten years, complained.

"Qingbei Campus Tour" is one of the most popular products in the summer. Su Yu, head of Beijing Study Travel Service Co., Ltd., told China Newsweek that more than half of the recent consultation calls offered to visit the campuses of Tsinghua University and Peking University. Su Yu observed that since its first launch more than 20 years ago, the "college tour" product has not changed much, and the homogenization problem is serious. Some institutions simply take children from outside Beijing into the school for a walk, take pictures, and go to the cafeteria for a meal.

After the epidemic, "college travel" has become more difficult, but it still cannot stop the study groups with different talents. Most universities restrict the entry of people outside the university, taking Tsinghua Peking University as an example, currently only accept special groups such as alumni to visit the campus, and you also need to make an appointment in advance and enter with your ID card. "The organizers send the children to the school through various personal connections, in order not to be discovered, they cannot fly flags, they are not allowed to wear uniform clothing, they are divided into zeros, three or five places to mingle, and the children are happy to go around in a circle, what can they learn?" Su Yu admits that the organizers focused on building channels, not content design.

Driven by schools and sought after by parents, the research market has expanded rapidly in recent years, but the industry is full of chaos. The "China Study Travel Development Report 2021" summarizes several industry pain points such as curriculum, funding, talent, and safety. The most obvious manifestation is "travel without learning, high price and low quality", and whether there are relatively hidden problems such as false publicity or safety risks, it is difficult for consumers to detect in the first time.

After the introduction of the "double reduction" policy, parents who originally signed up for extracurricular tutoring for their children have turned their attention to research, but in the face of overwhelming advertising, most parents do not clearly understand the concept of "study trip". Is the money for research worth it? How should research groups that travel between education and the market be designed and priced? In the eyes of many interviewees, the mutation of the "high-priced study group" has changed the taste of research.

At 7 a.m. on June 5, Beijing South Railway Station was already crowded with waves of students leaving the province to study: in just one hour, hundreds of people from five primary and secondary schools stepped on the train to Shanghai, Huangshan and other places. Photo by reporter Li Mingzi

"I treat the school as a garden, the school slaughters me like a pig"

In mid-April this year, a Foshan parent with the screen name "Sun Kongkong" sent 12 questions about the "chaos" of his child's school, and the two videos were viewed nearly 10 million times on the website Bilibili, attracting widespread attention.

The private school where his daughter attends organizes primary school students to "study abroad" in Hong Kong for 5 days and costs 5,980 yuan, which is much higher than the actual purchase price of the trip. However, the content and itinerary of the "study" are extremely vague, only mentioning the "Hong Kong Leadership Training Course", "Hong Kong School Visit and Exchange Program" and "Hong Kong Technology Course" in general terms, among which the most clear "study" location is Hong Kong Disneyland. In addition, Sun Kongkong also raised issues such as whether the agreement has overlord clauses, how to ensure the safety of students, and the charging account is a personal number.

"Is it really voluntary to attend this event? Or do it in the name of voluntariness? Will students who do not attend this event receive special treatment? "Has the company chosen by the school to undertake the event been investigated?" This may involve more than 1.93 million large projects, but also involves so many student safety activities, must choose a large experienced company, which involves tendering, so did the school do this? Parent Sun Kongkong angrily accused in the video, "I treat the school as a garden, and the school slaughters me like a pig." ”

After the interview, the university responded to Sun Kongkong's questions and canceled the study trip. "I no longer express any opinions or opinions on the study tour." Sun Kongkong replied to China Newsweek, "Research and study is a mandatory requirement put forward by the Education Commission, and schools, teachers, and parents have no choice. ”

Study tours are indeed one of the requirements of the education authorities. In November 2016, the opinions on study trips for primary and secondary school students were officially released. The "Opinions on Promoting Study Trips for Primary and Secondary School Students" (hereinafter referred to as the "Opinions") issued by the Ministry of Education and other eleven departments requires that study trips be included in school education and teaching plans, and considered as a whole with comprehensive practical activity courses, so as to promote the organic integration of study trips and school curricula.

"Before that, many institutions had already explored research from the bottom up, and after 2016, study trips became top-down institutional promotion and construction, allowing students to travel during the semester and making research a compulsory course, bringing great changes to the education system and industry." Zhang Yang, associate researcher of the Industry Institute of China Tourism Research Institute and editor-in-chief of the "China Travel Service Industry Development Report", said.

However, the "Opinions" also emphasizes that it is necessary to carefully design the study trip activity courses, so as to achieve lofty intentions, clear goals, vivid activities, and effective learning, so as to avoid the phenomenon of "only traveling without learning" or "only learning without traveling".

Zheng Fei's son has participated in the study organized by the school since the third grade of primary school, went to the aquarium to watch the growth process of whales, and visited the Dingyuan ship for ideological education. Seeing the children having fun and going home safely, Zheng Fei is also willing to try more research products. There are many parents who share the same concept as Zheng Fei, as long as the child has fun and is safe, there is a possibility of repurchase.

"The study itself is meaningful, but it does not rule out that some institutions hold on to the parents' mentality of 'but pray for the safety and happiness of their children', and the study trips launched are just tours dressed in the guise of 'research'." After the product is increased, the quality control may be lower. Yan Chu, an educational institution consultant who has been established for more than ten years, gave an example that for children in first-tier cities, taking them out to set off fireworks, light a cannon fight, catch two bugs at night, they can have a good time, and then package it as a "natural practice". "The question is, is this called research?"

In February 2021, when the Beijing Municipal Education Commission issued the Notice on Strengthening the Management of Study Trips in Primary and Secondary Schools in the City, it was pointed out that disguised tourism should not be carried out in the name of organizing study trips, so as to ensure that students "travel to study" and "travel to learn", and avoid "only traveling without learning".

When parents find that the institution "takes their children out to play in the name of learning", they will naturally raise the question that "the price is much more expensive than pure travel".

"Research is also one of the very few programs that can be charged to parents at present." Yan Chu said frankly that the subsidy in Beijing is 100 yuan per student per year, but the policies are different in different places, many provinces do not have this subsidy, the cost is all paid by parents, some schools study four times a year, winter and summer vacations, spring and autumn trips, each student's annual research investment is 20,000 or 30,000 yuan, "many parents are about to collapse."

Geng Lei, a staff member of the Liaoning Museum, disclosed in the article "Worries and Thoughts on the New Phenomenon of Museum Study Tour in the City" that although the fee for museum study tours is low compared with the fee of tens of thousands of yuan for overseas study tours, it is actually a lot of fees, with a minimum of one or two thousand yuan for one or two days of museum study tours, and some activities cost between 400 and 600 yuan for listening to a two-hour explanation. Most public museums in China have been open for free since 2008, and institutions have almost no admission costs for visiting museums, but they charge students and parents a large amount of tuition.

Since there is basically no entry threshold in the research and study market, the organizers tend to make profits, and the level is mixed. Geng Lei wrote an article for example, as far as museum research is concerned, many leading instructors have a half-understanding of cultural relics, full of loopholes in their explanations, or simply read about cultural relics explanation license books, and are vague about the questions raised by students. To make matters worse, the cultural relics "Zhang Guan Li Dai" are displayed and misinformation is instilled in students. Some institutions simply engage in "exploration and discovery" in the exhibition hall, allowing students to shuttle through the venue with "task cards" and fill in the blanks by themselves, which not only disrupts the normal order of public places, affects others' viewing of the exhibition, but also has potential safety hazards.

On May 18, the patriotic education base of Hukou County, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province, ushered in a wave of research and study. Photo/Visual China

Hidden problems that are difficult to prevent

Some products carry the slogans of "learning science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences" and "face to face with scientists", which is actually to go to a restaurant open to the outside world at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for a meal, or go to the Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to study abroad.

What's more, they also raised the banner of "traveling with academicians". "I am worried that the Chinese Academy of Sciences cracks down on counterfeiting every day," said Wang Huwen, CEO of Beijing MicroPort Blog Education Technology Co., Ltd.

In addition, there are many pseudo-research products on the market that "hang sheep's heads and sell dog meat", such as "seven-day rapid abacus mental arithmetic study camp". "Parents should also be vigilant, have a correct attitude, and maintain reasonable expectations for research." Yan Chu said that this kind of crash course, on the one hand, has captured the enthusiasm of parents to hope for Jackie Chan, and on the other hand, most of them are "miracle moves" for the recruitment of training institutions. Some extracurricular tuition classes cannot recruit students after the introduction of the "double reduction", so they rub the traffic of "research" on the name, and attract traffic to the cram school by running pseudo-research activities, "just like when artificial intelligence is on fire, everything has to hang an AI label." ”

"Research is such a non-standard product that cannot be explored without experience." Yu Huiqing, a research trip instructor of Zhongxin Travel Group, said that the customers of the research project can be generally divided into two categories, the "school" large customers are mainly based on the volume, and after the review of parents, schools and education commissions, relatively speaking, they are more guaranteed in terms of quality, price and safety, while the pricing and quality of the project for the market to recruit individual customers are completely market behavior.

Compared with the issue of quality and price, parents are most concerned about relatively hidden security risks. "After returning from the study trip, several children had high fever or vomiting and diarrhea; molested, beaten and abused in summer camps; The child was broken by a summer camp martial arts instructor..."In recent years, the safety of study trips has been frequently exposed.

On August 5, 2021, the China Exploration Association issued a statement saying that a 16-year-old child died in an accident in the youth Tengger Desert Adventure project organized by the association. Jiang Mou, the organizer of the expedition project, and Wang Mou, the leader of the team leading Zheng through the desert, were placed on file for investigation on suspicion of the crime of major liability accident, and the Alxa Zuoqi People's Procuratorate filed a public prosecution with the court on suspicion of manslaughter. On March 22 this year, the case was tried at the Alxa Zuoqi People's Court of the Alxa League of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, but the verdict was not pronounced in court.

"Responsibility determination is a very complex process, can only be said to once again to the industry to wake up, each company tries to combine its own advantages to develop research and learning lines, for new products to repeatedly discuss, rather give up, than rush forward." Yu Huiqing said.

The "Tourism Industry Standard Study Travel Service Specification" issued in 2016 stipulates that "at least one safety officer should be assigned to each study tour team", but the level of safety officers and whether safety education and prevention and control work can be implemented depends on the implementation of the institution.

Yu Huiqing and his team once planned a hiking activity of "climbing over Ligong", considering the physical fitness level of today's middle school students, after repeated discussions with the school, the original "more than 30 kilometers of trekking" was changed to "16 kilometers round trip experience", if you feel uncomfortable, withdraw at any time, and there are teachers and team doctors at the end of the team to answer. On the day of the event, 3 students withdrew halfway due to altitude sickness, and all of them returned safely because they made sufficient plans in advance.

"Can you ensure that the child does not leave the line of sight of the tour leader, does it have a plan to deal with emergencies in a timely manner, and what resources can be mobilized around?" Every time he went to the scene in advance, Yu Huiqing would repeatedly ask himself these questions. Her current research products have clear age requirements, for example, children under the age of 8 do not fly solo and only do parent-child tours. "Human life is at stake, it is better to be conservative." Yu Huiqing said.

"At present, many of the understanding of the chaos of study trips is not deep enough on the surface." At the seminar on "Current Situation, Challenges and Future of Study Tours" held in Beijing in 2019, Wu Ruoshan, chairman and chief researcher of the People's Cultural Tourism Think Tank, gave an example that it is easier for everyone to find the chaos of inaccurate words of tour guides in study trips, but they cannot find the essence of lack of standardization and quality supervision behind them, and it is easier to blame travel agencies for problems, but they cannot find shortcomings such as lack of insurance in education and training institutions.

Wu Ruoshan reminded that in the initial stage, relevant departments and scholars should strengthen research and quality supervision on the chaotic nature of study trips. If we only grasp the superficial chaos, but not the essence, then when the "small seedlings" and "small problems" grow up and become fat, the administrative cost of relevant governance will be very high.

Blurred faces, who will lead

Back in 2017, when she founded the study travel service company, Su Yu's biggest challenge was how to enter the school.

"To put it bluntly, there are no connections." Su Yu explained that at that time, the market was not standardized enough, and there were differences in the understanding of research and learning in different schools, such as mixed with the personal preferences of the school leader, which often caused a chaotic bidding situation, and the final selected organizer did not necessarily win with the course product.

"Similar black box operations are not an isolated phenomenon." A person in charge of a travel agency, who did not want to be named, recalled that in the summer of 2018, friends and children participated in a study trip to their school, a five-day trip to Chengdu and its surroundings, which took two days on the road, charging more than 3,000 yuan per person, and the gross profit margin of only one grade group was nearly one million yuan, and the profit margin could reach 340%, which was obviously unreasonable. After enquiry, it was learned that the product did not go through the bidding process, and parents and students had no alternatives. What is even more perverse is that in the study manual, the cultural company that organized the event used a very small font size, which could not be found without careful looking. "You don't need such a good publicity opportunity, most of them are tricky."

A popular unspoken rule is that many schools use "research" as a teacher benefit. "A new route every year." Yan Chu said that in order to retain large customers, the company has to rack its brains to design new courses and go to more remote places, and an immature route will not only increase transportation, accommodation, and course development costs, but also lead to other variables, such as various security risks. "The biggest challenge is quotation and execution, and the focus is shifting to resource integration rather than curriculum development."

"The final study plan depends on how the principal, teachers, parents, students and the host organization play the game." Yan Chu concluded that "research" involves many activities such as study, tourism, food and accommodation, and is in the intersection of education, science and technology, cultural tourism, industry and commerce and other fields in terms of supervision.

Yan Chu's educational institution once received a well-known principal who advocated allowing students to design their own study routes as another example of encouraging students to freely develop their educational philosophy. Specifically, after several rounds of competition, the students finally determined that the research location was in Xi'an, and after multiple searches, they identified several scenic spots such as the Terracotta Army, the museum, and the Stele Forest, and then the university organized a bidding, and the winning institution was responsible for the specific implementation of transportation, accommodation, catering, tickets and other links.

"At most, this is a student's own travel route, not a study." Yan Chu said. In 2016, the Ministry of Education and other eleven departments issued the "Opinions on Promoting Study Tours for Primary and Secondary School Students", which clearly defined study trips as an "off-campus educational activity that combines research learning and travel experience".

"The so-called research learning must first put forward a hypothesis, and then confirm or falsify it through scientific experiments, and the research results are open-ended, not fixed knowledge points." Ji Min, an education consultant at a research institution in Beijing, believes that the study of history and humanities should also have the basic spirit of scientific inquiry, for example, looking at the Xi'an City Wall can make students think about why the ancient city defense was laid out this way.

"Ask students good questions, not just output." As the head of a science and technology innovation company, Ji Min hopes that "research and learning" can make up for the lack of "science education" in traditional classroom education and cultivate students' ability of independent thinking and scientific inquiry.

But the reality is that practitioners do not have a unified answer to "what is research". Many respondents believe that passive learning during travel is also a kind of research, "as long as it inspires interest and gains, it is learning." A research instructor paraphrased Tao Xingzhi's educational theory of "life is education, society is school" and believes that "studying what gestures to use to spread cumin because you like barbecue is also a kind of learning."

The definition of "research" in local policies is also not completely consistent. For example, the local standard of Jiangsu Province "Regulations for the Construction of Study Tourism Demonstration Bases" defines study tourism as "tourism practice activities", that is, tourism practice activities carried out around improving tourists' comprehensive literacy and tourism experience quality by relying on various cultural and tourism resources and facilities to promote all-round human development and strengthen cultural self-confidence.

"The biggest chaos in the research market is that it blurs the boundaries between research and study tours and tourism." Ji Min said that this brings the problem of "traveling without learning", and even makes it impossible for consumers to define "whether there is travel without learning", which is detrimental to the development of students, parents and the normative development of the industry.

Wang Huwen believes that the model of "travel + learning" can be divided into different stages such as study tours, research and exploration, from easy to difficult, and each performs its own duties. For example, for younger students or students who are new to research in a certain professional field, they can start with a study tour to stimulate interest, and then start research, and then try adventure after they have certain scientific literacy and skills.

Compared with ordinary travel, research learning is more threshold and boring. Wang Huwen took an overseas study as an example, when he asked a middle school science teacher in San Diego to take students to do a week-long project on the environmental impact of cigarette butts, one of which was to take samples from Long Beach, each group of students picked up cigarette butts in a 50-meter-long, 1-meter-wide sample square, one person was responsible for picking, one was responsible for recording, and one person held a ruler to measure accurately. "The fun of scientific research must first go through a period of hard work, and how many students will actively choose to endure hardship?"

In the process of study, students want to "play well", and the first demand of parents is "absolute safety", "but the real study is to endure hardships." Yan Chu said. Parents must be distressed to see their children come back "dark and thin", either the next time to change institutions, or the institution continues to increase the cost of food and accommodation, it is bound to compress the investment in curriculum research and development, from wild camping for rainforest investigation to "live in a star hotel + bus transfer", considering the risk of increased transportation, and finally it is likely to become a day trip to the botanical garden.

"Whether it is a travel agency that needs to enhance its curriculum development capabilities, or an educational institution that needs to accumulate food, housing and transportation resources, if you want to do a good job in research and learning products, you have to add additional costs." Wang Huwen felt helpless that the research in the middle of various fields lacked unified evaluation standards for content.

The study takes travel as the carrier, and travel can be compared from the aspects of food, accommodation and transportation conditions and quotations, and finally slides to the question of "which company is cost-effective", ignoring the content of "learning".

"The market is big, but everyone's awareness of research needs to be improved." Yan Chu said very frankly that many of the company's research products have won awards issued by educational institutions, but they are not popular, they are shelved, and it is difficult to land 100% as a signboard, what they are really doing is business, not the most idealized education, "after all, institutions have to make money to survive."

The rapidly expanding research market

The industry called 2016 the "first year of research", policies leveraged demand, supply quickly caught up, and the number of research enterprises soared.

Luo Shugang, chairman of the Education, Science, Culture and Health Committee of the National People's Congress, shared a set of data in a speech in March this year: the scale of study trips increased to 4.8 million in 2019, 4.94 million in 2021, exceeding the number of people before the epidemic, and the number of study trips exceeded 6 million in 2022, reaching a record high. This situation is unique among other tourism categories, which shows the strong momentum of demand for study trips.

According to the "China Study Tour Development Report" released by the China Tourism Research Institute, the number of research institutions has reached 31,699 in 2021. From the demand side, the potential consumer group of China's research and study market has exceeded 200 million, and the potential overall market size has exceeded 100 billion yuan, becoming a new blue ocean in the tourism market.

Sensing new opportunities, Su Yu, who has been in the industry for more than 20 years, immediately established a research company after the introduction of the policy. "In response to the impact of online travel (OTA) on the traditional tourism industry, research is one of the few categories that can be distinguished offline."

"The overall business of the travel agency sector has been shrinking after experiencing the impact of individual travel, and in other market segments, it is difficult to see such a large-scale group travel model as Yanxue, and Yanxue will naturally become an important business for travel agencies." Zhang Yang analyzed that at present, the owners are relatively diversified, mainly travel agencies, or set up independent research departments, branches, or directly transferred to specialized research enterprises, as well as parent-child education institutions, study abroad intermediaries, language training institutions, camp base enterprises, etc.

After the introduction of the "double reduction" policy in 2021, extracurricular teaching and training institutions have also set their sights on the research market. Travel agencies, educational institutions, consulting agencies, etc. are all vying to seize the study travel market.

The huge market has attracted a lot of new players and is still entering the track. Taking New Oriental as an example, as early as 2005, New Oriental established an international study tour brand and gradually expanded domestic research and camp education. In October 2020, New Oriental invested in the global travel and cultural content platform "Sanmao Tour" to further expand its territory in the field of research. Another education and training giant, Xueersi (Good Future), has invested in the establishment of a well-known parent-child travel e-commerce platform "Le Xueying", which has a large number of research and study travel products. NetEase has also been involved in the research business, and in November 2021, Youdao Research (Hangzhou) Tourism Service Co., Ltd. was established with a registered capital of 5 million yuan, which is wholly owned by Hangzhou NetEase Critical Point Education Technology Co., Ltd.

The entry of K12 education companies and leading Internet companies with student sources has brought about the large-scale trend of the research market, but the pattern of "small scattered" in the industry has not fundamentally changed. Previously, the "Tourism Green Paper 2018-2019 China Tourism Development Analysis and Prospects" jointly issued by multiple institutions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences pointed out that the current definition of study tourism is vague and the industry standards are not perfect, resulting in problems such as low entry barriers and imperfect exit mechanisms in the industry. The favorable policy has attracted a large number of institutions to enter the research field, and from the perspective of professionalism and standardization, these enterprises are inevitably "mixed".

"Many institutions just package the previous overseas travel routes and label them with the name of research." Ji Min complained that the market for overseas research is more chaotic, and ordering a dish can also be counted as research. In fact, due to differences in language levels, cultural differences, and the prohibition of scientific research institutions from opening to the outside world, it is more difficult to do overseas research than at home.

But in the eyes of institutions that really want to do research, money is not so easy to earn. A practitioner said that the same tourism, the cost of research is obviously higher, on the basis of traditional tourism, it is necessary to develop courses and teaching materials in advance, match lecturers and teaching materials, and coordinate research venues that can accommodate a large number of student activities. Taking the "two days and one night" study trip to the province as an example, the quotation to schools in Beijing is generally about 1,500 yuan, excluding transportation and accommodation, each person only earns one or two hundred yuan, and if you subtract the cost of course research and development, the per capita profit is only a few tens of yuan.

After the epidemic, the research market has experienced a new round of market reshuffle. According to the above-mentioned practitioners, from the early days of the new crown epidemic to April and May 2020, more than 17,000 companies doing study tours have closed, and new companies have been established. Many enterprises lacking core competitiveness have transformed or withdrawn after the epidemic, and the industry has been forced to reshuffle, virtually raising the entry threshold.

According to the statistics of the "China Study Tour Development Report 2022-2023", in 2022, the number of projects including research projects in bidding projects in various parts of China decreased by 4.27% compared with 2021, and the growth rate of newly established research enterprises in 2022 was significantly lower than that in 2021.

Zhang Yang reminded that the industry recovered quickly after the epidemic, "This round needs to pay attention to whether those low-priced products with substandard service quality will take the opportunity to return to the market." ”

"The study tour market is highly fragmented." Luo Shugang believes that great importance should be attached to the supervision of the study travel market. "At present, the supervision of the mainland study travel market is not in place, which is fundamentally a lack of standards. It is necessary to formulate access standards, qualification standards, product standards, operation standards, content standards, etc. for study trips, and then strictly supervise them according to the standards. ”

While waiting for relevant regulatory policies, leading companies are also taking the lead in industry norms. "Study tours are a policy-catalyzed market, which relies on many companies to spell it out little by little." Su Yu said that an emerging market will inevitably encounter various problems in the early stage of development, and practitioners are more afraid to see this new thing that has been hard to grow up be cut off.

(At the request of interviewees, Zheng Fei, Yan Chu, and Ji Min are pseudonyms in the article)

Published in the 1096th issue of China Newsweek magazine on June 19, 2023

Magazine Title: Mutated "High-Price Study Group": Education or Business?

Reporter: Li Mingzi